As an author, essayist, visual artist, plus spoken word performer, William S. Burroughs spent a lifetime dismantling control mechanisms through subversive plus surreal art that have had far reaching influences in disukai banyak orang culture. In the year that would have marked his 100th birthday, publications, art exhibitions, films, plus other events worldwide have spent 2014 honoring Burroughs’s legacy. And on November 7, Toronto’s Music Gallery produced an evening of its own.

Arriving at the Music Gallery, audiences were immediately immersed in a den of dim lights, as two “dreamachines” spun idly atop tables in the room. Invented by Brion Gysin plus Ian Sommerville—friends plus collaborators of the man of the hour—many needed no introduction to these devices plus gravitated towards them without persuasion. For the uninitiated, they’re stroboscopic flicker devices that spin at a rate said to engage the alpha waves in users’ brains; allegedly inducing hypnagogic states plus “drugless” highs when users “view” them through closed eyelids. But on a more important level, the dreamachines afford users the unique ability to unlock their minds plus let them wander from the stable “realities” otherwise encountered through visual stimulation. Meanwhile, multi-woodwind specialist, composer, plus Burroughs scholar Glen Hall provided a multi-media portrait of William Burroughs that employed some of the same practices the visionary used himself; CCMC ditched structure entirely plus stuck to a formula they’ve excelled at since the 70s: free, authentic self expression.

Canadian Creative Music Collective (CCMC) member plus disukai banyak orang Canadian poet Paul Dutton opened the CCMC’s set with a collection of spit, guttural growls, plus garbled speech from what seemed like every recess of his diaphragm, while musician/composers John Kamevaar plus John Oswald combined an interesting mix of saxophone plus synthetic percussion blasts (with Michael Snow away on tour, the group performed as a trio). It was a bit disappointing that CCMC wrapped their set after barely half an hour, but shaming them for denying anything more would be an exercise in futility plus bad faith. As Toronto’s longest-running free-improvising group they’ve spent 40 years liberated from resmi restrictions like genre, melody, plus music theory, so expecting them to perform any longer would’ve been a serious error. After CCMC finished the roughly 25-minute piece they introduced themselves with, things seemed complete when Dutton declared “And that appears to be that.” But then he started rambling about playing some more, plus Oswald took it as a cue to accompany the verse with some crackle-and-pop percussion. Neglecting his instrument, Kamevaar initially looked somewhat impatient with the exercise, but eventually he cracked a smile plus joined in after Dutton mumbled something about how the piano had been completely silent all night.